The Fairfax Incident
Page 12
I kept looking at Dr. Blythe’s corpse. “It was shaping up to be a pretty good day until I heard from you.”
Hauser grinned. “Glad to see the high life hasn’t cost you your sense of humor. Let’s keep the laughs going by you telling me how you came to know the deceased.”
I knew Mr. Van Dorn would want me to keep the details to a minimum, especially from Hauser. Everything he heard would go right back to Chief Carmichael. The less that bastard knew, the better.
I told him the bare minimum. “I met him for the first time yesterday afternoon.”
“Where?”
“At the New York Athletic Club.”
Hauser looked over at Junior. “You hear that, Bill? Be sure to write that down and underline it. The New York Athletic Club. Fancy, ain’t it?”
Bill nodded. “Fancier than I could ever afford if I saved up for a year.”
I smiled. “Well, when your balls finally drop, sonny, give me a call. I’ll take you there to celebrate the occasion.”
Junior pushed off the wall, but Hauser shook him off before looking back at me. “Still got the mouth, don’t you, Charlie?”
“Wine and smartasses only get better with age.” I finally looked at Hauser. “Too bad you’ll only find out about the aging part.”
Hauser let the insult pass. “The New York Athletic Club’s an awfully tony place. What’d you two swells talk about?”
“Oh, the usual.” I made a show of fishing a cigarette from my gold case and lighting it. “Half-witted cops on the take. Errand boys who wait for orders all day long.” I blew the smoke through my nostrils. “Your name came up.”
Hauser wasn’t grinning anymore. “I’m going to ask nicely one last time. What did you two talk about?”
I knew what he wanted, but I wouldn’t let him have it easily. “We talked about the weather. Polo matches. Types of caviar we like. Where we like to go on vacation. Nothing you’d understand.”
Hauser took a couple of steps closer to me but I didn’t budge. I knew he had a temper and liked to use his fists. I also knew how to get under his skin. Normally, annoying him would’ve been the highlight of my day. But the sight of a sad old man I liked sitting dead ten feet away kind of ruined it for me.
Hauser’s jaw tightened. “What’s your name doing in Dr. Blythe’s book for seven o’clock tonight?”
“Why didn’t you ask me that before? He invited me to go to the Stuyvesant Society gala down at the Waldorf. Said he wanted to introduce me to some people.”
“No kidding? What people?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to be introduced to them, now would I?” I shook my head. “You used to be a better detective than that.”
His face was beginning to turn just a bit redder. “Don’t make this any harder on yourself than it has to be. There’s only one reason why a guy like that would talk to a bum like you, and that’s because you’re working on a case. Maybe a case involving his dead brother-in-law. A case that’s already been settled and put away.”
“Or maybe he just wanted someone to talk to at the gala.”
“If he did, he wouldn’t choose you. I’ve got a feeling he either hired you to look into Fairfax’s death or you were pumping him for information. I don’t care which, I just want to know what.”
“And I don’t care what you want because I’m afraid that’s none of your goddamned business.”
“Sure it is.” Hauser took another step closer and spoke right into my ear. “Because based on what we know right now, you’re the last person who saw Dr. Blythe alive.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Steve,” I said. “The last person who saw him alive is whoever killed him.”
Kronauer’s cigar damned near fell out of his mouth. “Murder? Christ, Charlie, who said anything about murder? I just told you it was a coronary.”
“That’s what Carmichael’s office told you to say. You know better than that.”
Kronauer looked away. “Goddamn it, Charlie. Leave it alone. What do you care anyway? You’re not even a cop anymore.”
“I care because a good man’s been murdered, and for some reason, no one around here seems to give a damn.”
Hauser let out a big laugh and looked at his young partner in the corner. “You know, Billy, just before the chief bounced this clown off the force he was just another Tammany hack running out his string until retirement. Tagging and bagging dead dopers and whores on the graveyard shift. A year out on his own and all of a sudden he thinks he’s Philo Vance.”
“Running down dead whores beat the hell out of being Carmichael’s cabin boy.” I winked. “But you seem to love the job, don’t you, Steve?”
Hauser wasn’t laughing anymore. I half expected him to hit me. I half hoped he would. He may have had five years and sixty pounds of muscle on me, but no one had ever called me a pushover. I’d always wondered which one of us would walk away. I knew he thought he would. I was never that sure.
But now wasn’t the time to find out.
“Unless you’ve skimmed enough graft to keep you afloat for a while, step back. Because if you hit me, you’ll be off the force before the end of shift.”
Hauser surprised me by, indeed, stepping back. “The deputy chief coroner of the City of New York just said this looks like a coronary, pending further investigation. What makes you say different?”
Since it had nothing to do with the Fairfax case, I decided to tell him. “Because when I met Dr. Blythe yesterday at the club, he told me his drinks get darker as the day goes on. Said he starts off with gin during the day, but likes to cap off every night with a good scotch. And even the deputy chief coroner for the City of New York just said he reeks of gin. Expensive gin, I think were his exact words.”
Hauser looked at Kronauer, who shrugged. “Sure, it’s gin. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a coronary. Maybe he just got sick of scotch last night and decided to switch to gin instead.”
“And spill it all over himself?” I asked. “I can smell it from here. He reeks of it, way too much even if he’d been drinking all day and all night.”
“So what?” Hauser said. “Maybe he spilled some of it while he was staggering around. You worked vice, Charlie. I don’t have to tell you what drunks are like when they’re on a tear.”
I looked around the neatness of the study. “Does this look like a place where a drunk went on a bender? There’s not a pillow out of place. Hell, the gin decanter is on the bar where it belongs. It’s even got the top on it. If he was on a toot, he’s the neatest drunk I’ve ever seen.”
I could tell Hauser was getting the point, but didn’t want to admit it. He said, “Maybe the maid cleaned up a bit before we got here. Didn’t want us to see the place as a mess. To protect the good doctor’s reputation.”
“Let’s say she did. What about the drapes and the lights?”
Hauser looked around the room. “What about them?”
I looked at the crime scene photographer. “Did you close those drapes to get a better shot of the body?”
He looked nervous, and quickly shook his head. “No. I didn’t touch anything. Everything was like this when I got here.”
I looked back at Hauser. “What about the maid? Did she close them?”
“No.” Hauser didn’t sound happy about it. “And she didn’t clean up, either. She got here at seven thirty, saw the body, and ran out again. She called it in from a neighbor’s apartment down the hall. She was so scared, she didn’t even close the door behind her.”
I looked up at the chandelier. “She turn on that light?”
Junior said, “That was me. The whole place was dark when we got here, except for the light in the hallway. The maid turned that one on when she came in.”
“You write that down in your notebook?”
The look on Junior’s face told me he hadn’t.
“What were we supposed to do, stupid?” Hauser yelled at me. “Look around in the dark?”
“No. You were supposed to ask why it was dark in the first place.”
Kronauer took a step back and swore to himself.
But Hauser and Junior still didn’t see my point. “So it was dark,” Junior said. “So what?”
I decided to lay it out for them. “You got here at nine in the morning when the sun was up, right? But the apartment was still dark because the drapes were drawn.” I pointed at the coroner. “Kronauer placed the time of death sometime in the middle of the night, right?”
“I still do,” Kronauer said.
I looked at Hauser. “So, by your theory, a very drunken Dr. Blythe staggers out of his bedroom, walks down the hall, comes in here, pours himself a drink, puts the bottle back where it belongs, sits down at his desk, has a heart attack, and dies.”
Hauser threw out his hands. “What’s wrong with that?”
Kronauer answered for me. “Because with the drapes drawn and no lights on, it would have been pitch-black in here. He wouldn’t have done all that in the dark. Hell, he didn’t even turn on his desk lamp.”
“He could’ve turned off the light just before he had the heart attack,” Hauser offered.
Kronauer shut his eyes. “Highly unlikely.”
“Not to mention,” I added, “he wasn’t wearing his glasses.”
Kronauer took a closer look at Blythe’s face and frowned. “He’s right. There are indentations alongside the bridge of his nose, showing the deceased wore glasses. And there’s no sign of them in the immediate area.” He swore again as he backed away.
Junior and the photographer rushed past me and headed down the hall. I figured that’s where Blythe’s bedroom was. “You’ll probably find his glasses still on his nightstand,” I said. “Right where he left them when whoever killed him dragged him out here. And turned out the light when they left. At least they’re polite killers.”
Hauser stormed passed me, hot on Junior’s heels.
Kronauer flattened down what little hair he still had. Now that it was just the two of us, he said, “You can never keep your damned mouth shut, can you?”
“Like the way you kept it shut about the Fairfax suicide being an accident? What the hell is going on around here anyway?”
“I do what I’m told, Charlie. Not all of us have Harriman Van Dorn’s phone number in our wallets.”
I realized arguing with Kronauer was pointless. He lived for the dead, for the job. He’d been offered the head coroner’s post dozens of times over the years but had turned it down every single time. He never had the stomach for the politics then; I couldn’t expect him to handle it now. “Hauser tell you to write this off as a coronary?”
“Hauser strongly suggested I consider it,” Kronauer admitted. “Whether or not that comes straight from the chief’s office is anyone’s guess, but I’m not going to find out.”
There was no need to gloat. I’d always liked Kronauer. Besides, I owed him one for talking to me about the Fairfax case a few days before. “The gin tipped me off. The rest of it fell into place after that. I had the jump on you because Dr. Blythe told me about his habits yesterday. You would’ve figured it out eventually.”
“For all the good it’ll do me. What do you think the cause of death was?”
I remembered something he’d said to me on a crime scene a long time ago and decided to use it against him. “How the hell should I know? You’re the coroner.”
Kronauer rolled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “I’ll have the place dusted for prints, but I don’t think we’ll find anything.”
“Me either, but do it anyway.” I ditched my cigarette in a potted plant by the doorway as I turned to leave. “Let me know what you find out after the autopsy. And I want the truth, Hank, not whatever fable Carmichael tells you to invent. It’ll be our secret, scout’s honor.”
“I should have something by tonight, tomorrow at the latest.” Kronauer shut his eyes. “Christ, Charlie. What good does the truth ever do anyone anyway?”
I wished I had an answer for him, but I didn’t.
Chapter 14
I’d already seen all I could see at the apartment, so I headed back to my place. Even though I had people gunning for me, I decided to skip the taxi and take my chances with the good citizens of the shantytown that had sprung up in Central Park since the Crash. Most of the poor bastards didn’t have enough money to buy food, much less submachine guns.
Taking a cab would’ve been smarter but I needed air, and even the smell from the smoldering cook fires of Hooverville helped clear my mind.
It helped keep my anger in check.
Because I was damned angry.
Angry because I hated seeing Dr. Blythe lying dead like that. I hated thinking of the way he’d probably died, too. Dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, brought into the study he loved, and probably tortured before he’d died. Maybe it had been a coronary after all, but it wouldn’t have been peaceful.
I didn’t have a shred of evidence to go on, but I figured the same people who’d killed Blythe were probably the same sons of bitches who had tried to kill me in the Fairfax offices. After they’d missed me, they probably made a beeline for the doctor, hoping he would tell them what Fairfax kept in his safe. That meant they must’ve known we’d talked, but I didn’t know how they could’ve known that. I was pretty good at spotting a tail, at least when I knew I was being followed, and I was sure no one had followed me to the club. Blondie had run off into the crowd, but he was lousy at following people. If he, or anyone else, had been watching me, I would’ve known, wouldn’t I?
Wouldn’t I?
That question nagged at me as I walked through the park. Had I missed a tail, just like I hadn’t realized I was being followed until someone took a shot at me? Until I spotted Blondie outside Nat’s? Had I been so soft that I’d led the man’s killers right to his doorstep?
No, I hadn’t. I may have lost a step or two in private service, but I hadn’t slipped up that much. And we had met at Blythe’s club, not his apartment. Hell, I didn’t even know where he lived until Hauser gave me the address.
That meant someone else had done their homework on Blythe. They knew where he lived, and went to his place to get the truth out of him. But I doubted the doctor had even known about the safe. If he’d known about it, he would’ve told me.
Miss Swenson was already feeding them all the information they needed, and hadn’t told them about the safe until that day. Thinking Blythe might be able to tell them about its contents had been a desperate move. An amateur move, but a deadly one just the same.
Until now, I figured they’d played some kind of role in getting Fairfax to kill himself. But Blythe’s death changed all that. Trying to shoot me on the street and killing Blythe showed me these people weren’t afraid to kill. They just weren’t particularly good at it. They had covered their tracks at the doctor’s apartment just well enough to show me they weren’t stupid, just ruthless.
I’d seen a lot of ruthless amateurs get a lot of good people killed over the years. In France, some of them were wearing uniforms with gold braids and a chest full of medals. Now, they’d killed someone I’d liked.
The Fairfax case had just gotten even more personal for me. And the information Miss Swenson had about her blackmailers was more important now than ever. I just hoped Mr. Van Dorn’s people—whoever the hell they were—already had it and were running it down. If they didn’t, I would.
Before the doctor’s murder, I had a feeling Countess Alexandra was central to all of this. After everything that had happened that day, I was absolutely sure of it.
I’d make a point of bringing
it up to her when I saw her at the gala later that night.
*****
That night was a set of firsts for me. My first time in a tuxedo. My first time at a fancy gala. And my first time hunting for royalty.
I didn’t know much about what The Stuyvesant Society actually did, just that it held its annual gala in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. I always got a kick out of the Waldorf. It reminded me of some of the big, old-style places I’d seen in France back during the war. Lots of marble, lots of brass, lots of old-world everything with a modern flair. I liked the place. It felt like New York, or at least what New York wished it was.
Mrs. Van Dorn insisted that my tuxedo be tailor-made for me from scratch, but I still felt uncomfortable in the damned thing. I’d also never developed the knack for tying a bow tie, which made me feel even more ridiculous than I already did.
When I saw the get-up on the rest of the men who were milling around the street and in the lobby, I knew my knot was too small, and crooked to boot. I didn’t want to embarrass Mr. Van Dorn by looking like a slob, so I quickly ducked into the one of the men’s rooms off the lobby to take another shot at tying it.
As I stood in front of the mirror, another guy in a tux came out of one of the stalls and washed his hands. He gave me a sympathetic smile as he washed up. He was drying his hands when he said, “I could never get the damned thing right either. My wife does mine for me.”
I didn’t bother telling him my wife took my kids and was living with another man up in Poughkeepsie. I just smiled back and kept working on the knot.
He finished washing up and left. I thought I’d heard the men’s lounge door lock behind him, which didn’t make sense. But when I looked over at the door, it made all the sense in the world.
Andrew J. Carmichael, Chief of the New York City Police Department, was blocking the door, all six feet three inches, two hundred and twenty pounds of him.
I’d known him too well for too long to really admire him, even before he put me out to pasture and kicked me off the force, but I had to admit he always looked like a million bucks. His blue tunic had been perfectly pressed. His brass buttons gleamed, even in the dim light of the bathroom. His badge and medals bore a perfect shine that would’ve made a French general jealous.